What makes you think its broken? That's just the way its supposed to work, maintaining a consistent ranking of posts across time/pages in your session.
I agree its not a great way to do it (like @cpr suggested) I prefer reddit's "not bad" approach.
I agree its not a great way to do it (like @cpr suggested) I prefer reddit's "not bad" approach.
It's a bug. It could just as well say "500 internal error".
Author's name is not Knuth and he's still alive, so yes - it's a bug, not a feature.
Going to an empty page is simply a bug / broken behaviour.
It may not be a "development" bug, in that the error occurs due to faulty code, but it should certainly be filed as a bug and assigned to someone who addresses user experience issues.
(Which at Google would mean being thrown into a black hole... http://data.whicdn.com/images/25373715/4171_d7e8_thumb.gif)
Given that, the expectation is not for "the next batch of stories in line", it is for "the current stories ranked from #31-50 inclusive", the way that simply visiting news.ycombinator.com gives you the current stories ranked from #1-30.
Someone prematurely optimized this aspect of Hacker News and it became a bit of a nightmare to use in the pursuit of "correctness" -- this would be good if the notion of "correct" were in fact correct, but it is an ideological purity having nothing to do with the needs of the community at large.
Because any other behavior would be preferable. Seriously, anything. Seeing the page I just left again would be better.